The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Data communication networks may comprise one or more computing nodes. Each node may receive and process unbounded, streaming data according to a particular schema. A schema may define the content, and/or the format of the content, in a data stream. Each node may send results to one or more downstream nodes, persistent storages, and/or some other receiving device, according to a schema.
In a modern data-driven sy1stem, the schema or format of a data stream may change at will. For example, a schema for a network data stream may include frequent status reports for each mission critical device on the network, which includes the device's Internet Protocol address and a time stamp and may change to include the power consumption, CPU usage, and available memory on each device.
A change in a data stream's schema may cause may cause a node to stop. However, some scenarios require that a node remain processing, in which cases the node is not allowed to be suspended or reconfigured to take advantage of a schema change.
While each of the drawing figures illustrates a particular embodiment for purposes of illustrating a clear example, other embodiments may omit, add to, reorder, and/or modify any of the elements shown in the drawing figures. For purposes of illustrating clear examples, one or more figures may be described with reference to one or more other figures, but using the particular arrangement illustrated in the one or more other figures is not required in other embodiments.